Thinking about a Decentralised Reddit Alternative

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3 points·CM30··8 comments

Or perhaps more accurately, here are my thoughts on how a forum based, federated Reddit like system could be the future of social media and potentially make centralised sites like Reddit obsolete.

It would be very heavily censorship resistant, give a lot of control to community users rather than venture capitalists and completely kill any 'lock in' effects to name but a few.

Aw, hell just bring back CompuServe.

I'm serious. Moderated communities with clear rules (usually "no advertising, no personal attacks") and organized sections.

And sysops could clean up after the community, by putting messages where they belonged and pruning threads.

Damn, I miss it.

Usenet newsgroups could be created as moderated groups.

rec.humor.funny was a well-known example.

Oh yes, that too!

The key element is moderators who knew what they were doing.

This existed 30+ years ago. Ever hear of Usenet? Unfortunately, as the masses invaded the Internet, its popularity waned...

Yeah, I remember Usenet. Definitely had a structure similar to this.

But I think the difference is that Usenet required a separate client to access, at least until those online readers like Google Groups came out after it was mostly dead.

Maybe something like this could work better with sites accessed through plain http?

Yep, that's true about the separate client. We could keep NNTP behind the scenes (for site-to-site communication / federation...) End users would never have to deal with it.

I would instead describe the downfall as the signal-to-noise became intolerably low.

And, ultimately, spam prevailed.

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